


rise in perfect light

by endquestionmark



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-17
Updated: 2013-06-17
Packaged: 2017-12-15 05:58:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/846102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy has nightmares.</p><p>He feels like he shouldn't — after all, Jim is alive; McCoy was there for the first stuttering beat of his heart, the first breath he took on his own, like watching him be born all over again. McCoy was there when his eyes fluttered open for the first time. Jim Kirk is up and making trouble all over again.</p><p>It's as if nothing ever happened, and that sets McCoy's teeth on edge like nothing else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	rise in perfect light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shecrows](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shecrows/gifts).



> For [Camille](http://leighway.tumblr.com/) on the anniversary of her birth! I'm so sorry, this wasn't meant to be full of fucking pain, but then my cocktail of allergy meds and painkillers kicked in and everything was a crapshoot. Congratulations on another year of not perishing from feelings over these space married dorkfaces. <33
> 
> Warnings for alcohol, discussion of death and implied survivor's guilt.
> 
> (Don't talk to me about the title. I know I'm an unoriginal fuck.)

Leonard McCoy has nightmares.

He feels like he shouldn't — after all, Jim is alive; McCoy was there for the first stuttering beat of his heart, the first breath he took on his own, like watching him be born all over again. McCoy was there when his eyes fluttered open for the first time. Jim Kirk is up and making trouble all over again, from picking a fight over the militaristic aspects of Pike's funeral to simply flirting with the wrong nurses (all of them).  Jim Kirk bursts into his office at all hours of the day and night.  Jim Kirk stumbles into his apartment in the ungodly hours of the morning, reeking of Scotch and sex.

It's as if nothing ever happened, and that sets McCoy's teeth on edge like nothing else.

++

"Jim, you're not invincible," he says, as gently as possible, the dozenth time Jim comms him, blackout drunk, from some street corner.

"I don't remember calling you," Jim slurs. "You sure it was me? Wasn't my evil intergalactic twin? What about him?" He waves at a lamppost.

" _Jim_ ," McCoy says, and walks them down the street, none too gently. Jim called him to take him home, not to wear kid gloves.

"I _know_ I'm not invincible," Jim says, voice swooping with petulance. "God, McCoy, if I wanted a lecture I'd have called my mother."

"You haven't called your mother," McCoy points out, steering them around a tree. Jim stumbles anyway, crushing a stem of ivy as he misses the tree by a generous inch. "You haven't called anyone."

"Yeah, well," Jim says, and McCoy wants to say: _What? What, Jim. How could you possibly explain that; your name is splashed across the tabloids and they're all lit up with your show-smile and your learned lines and your public statement and you can't call your mother?_ He wants to say it so badly he can feel it burning, acidic, in his throat. _Hell, you couldn't even call me._ Jim pauses for a moment there, arm draped over McCoy's shoulder, heavy as lead — dead weight, and McCoy goes cold at the thought — and for a moment, he thinks Jim is going to say something, give him some of the answers he's been waiting for, look him properly in the eye for the first time since he woke up, free of the drugs and the preventative sedation.

Jim lurches to the curb and throws up.

++

McCoy wakes up and Jim is not there.

His first response is to roll over and bury his head under the pillow, because usually when Jim wakes up, hellishly hungover, the first thing he does is try to spread the pain through whatever means he can. It's still ingrained in him from months ago, even though Jim hasn't done it — since he woke up, of course. Everything is since he woke up. Now Jim comms McCoy and tries to convince him to go skinny-dipping in the Bay, or climbs trees and has to be retrieved, or tries to park a police transport on top of the library dome. It had seemed all very regular for a few weeks; Jim Kirk raising hell, Jim Kirk trying to outrun his golden boy of Starfleet reputation.

"Why do you do it?" McCoy had asked him once, both of them shivering after losing their uniforms (again) to an ill-advised challenge Jim had accepted without hesitation. He watched Jim breathe for a moment, his breath clouding and then dissipating in the early morning chill. A fog had rolled in overnight, and the city looked abandoned, apocalyptic, haunted. "If I had a reputation like yours, I'd never do anything to —" and there he'd paused, waited for Jim to cut him off conveniently. Jim, damn him, had remained silent, never the type to be convenient if he could help it. Never. "- compromise it, I don't know, kid. Why?"

He'd watched his own breath for a long minute, then another; the fog swirled around them, eddying in their wake.

"I'm their wonder boy," Jim had said, eventually. "Wonder, as in miracle, as in _nobody knows why_ , as in _unreliable_ , as in _once in a million_."

"Don't be too modest now," McCoy had said, voice on autopilot even as he cringed away from the words.

"Oh, you know me, Bones," Jim had said, mouth crooked up in what was simultaneously a perfectly passable expression and an utter travesty of his usual wide-open, devil-may-care smile. "Couldn't disappoint."

He hadn't met McCoy's eyes then, right up until he'd grimaced his way into a smile, into something approximating his usual daredevil smirk, and now, throwing back the covers and running a hand through the mess of his hair, McCoy thinks that Jim hasn't met his eyes in a long time. Well, of course he has — they work together, for heaven's sake; they live together, a lot of the time; last night, Jim had looked up from his sprawl on the steps of a building five blocks from any bar McCoy could name, and made eye contact then, but. When McCoy met Jim, two sadsack fuckups on a shuttle neither of them would be on if they had any other option, he'd been dragged out of that bathroom by the scruff of his neck and shoved into a seat next to the only other too-old passenger not wearing cadet reds. His first impulse had been, frankly, to fling himself at the still-open door, take his chances with what remained of Earth to him, rather than let a glorified locker take him out into an infinite void.

"I hear these things are pretty safe," Jim Kirk had said then, eyes ringed by bruises and dried blood but still clear, still promising nothing but the truth. McCoy had said something he doesn't remember, buoyed up by desperate bravado and his pocket flask, and while Jim's face had remained blank, there had been amusement there too, sparkling. McCoy's eyes at that point had probably made him look manic in the worst possible way, and yet there Jim Kirk was, smiling a little even.

McCoy hasn't seen that sort of frankness, that sort of honesty and hope and genuine optimism, in Jim's eyes since they'd beamed down to Nibiru, Jim clapping McCoy on the shoulder. "It'll be fun!" he'd said, an unconscious echo of all the times he'd promised exactly that.

"Kid, if you were any more full of it, your eyes would be brown," McCoy had said, and yet that inimitable excitement had still been there, had still made it all — the stifling robes, the righteously homicidal indigenous species, the cliff dive, for fuck's sake — worth it.

Now he stumbles over to the couch where he'd left Jim last night, looking for some clue as to where Jim's gone and what sort of trouble he's going to have to get Jim out of once he gets there. Jim's boots are still by the door, his uniform jacket and trousers hung roughly over the back of McCoy's desk chair, and McCoy takes a look out the window at the dregs of a beautiful sunrise, starts swearing, and runs for the door.

The fire stairs, while technically off-limits, aren't secured beyond having a doorknob. They would probably be more secure without the doorknob and perpetually unlocked lock, Bones considers, as he scrambles up one flight of stairs after another, resolutely not wondering when the steps were last swept. Out of breath, he pauses, hands on his knees, in front of the roof door, before stepping out onto the thick silver roofpads, synthetic and rubbery under his bare feet.

There's a penthouse on the roof of the staff residencies, though McCoy doesn't know who lives there; it's perched atop the roof like the bridge of a starship, accessible by ladders, and that's where Jim is, back to the Bay and the Bridge in the distance, looking out into the urban jungle of the city, legs slung over the edge. There's a mug next to him, so McCoy doesn't bother with worry, mentally veering straight past it and into fury. He lets the door slam behind him, and when Jim doesn't turn at the noise, he clatters up the rusty, flaking ladder and steals Jim's coffee instead, sitting down next to him and letting his heels thump against the wall.

"You can't do this, Jim," he says, pausing for a sip of blessed, blessed caffeine, even if it does have too much sugar. "I swear, you can't —" and he's mid-breath, mid-inhalation to go on with his diatribe against early mornings and uncaring starship captains, when Jim snarls "I know, Bones, all right? I _know_ , I swear to God, I know I'm not invincible, don't you think I'm aware of that? I feel like I'm living on a fucking timer, I feel like some cosmic fucking event is going to come along and make me pay the piper, I _get it_ , I just. I just want to make it never have happened, okay, I want to go on without people staring at me like I'm some sort of fucking ghost. I want to get coffee and make eyes at the barista and actually have to _stand in line_ for something, I want —" and Jim just slumps, curls his hands around the edge of the rain gutter and lets his spine curl into a hopeless question mark.

McCoy takes a good look at him, and could kick himself. Jim's eyes are dull, doubtless a combination of the late night and the hangover; he's got dark circles for days, and red where he's been rubbing his eyes.

"You haven't been sleeping," he says, and feels an absolute moron for not noticing sooner, for not realizing, for enabling. "When was the last time you slept through the night, Jim?"

"I don't like to go to sleep, all right," Jim says, letting out his breath in a huff of irritation, shoulders rising as he steals the cup back and hunches over it. "I don't like falling asleep and I don't like not knowing, it's no big deal, I did way worse back in third year, remember? Don't think I slept for a week —"

"Not knowing what?" McCoy says, and hates himself for it a little, hates that sometimes the best medicine is knowing where to press, and then pressing until it hurts.

"Not knowing if I'll wake up," Jim says, in an utterly horrible monotone, as if it's just another fact. Earth's solar system is in the Orion arm of the Milky Way. McCoy's middle name is Horatio. Jim goes to sleep and doesn't know if he'll wake up. McCoy feels it cut straight through him like the sharpest razor he's ever imagined, just blunt force right now — he almost rocks with the blow — and knows he'll be bleeding out for days, enduring the tiny pains of muscle fibers and skin knitting back together, a cell at a time.

He tries to get his breath back, and Jim forces his shoulders down and back, works himself by degrees back upright, spine straight, fingers curled around his name.

"I didn't call you," he says, and McCoy gives up on trying to breathe now or ever, because this is it. He survived having Earth stolen from under him, and he survived three years of academia he never expected, and he survived flying around the endless nothingness of space in an admittedly beautiful and beloved glorified tin can for far longer than he ever thought he could, and this is it; he's going to die here, on this roof, staring at a city he ended up in by accident, of Jim Kirk. Cause of death: Jim Kirk. It's going to be a hell of an obituary. He feels like he'll be walking wounded forever.

"You didn't," he says, voice almost a whisper.

"I couldn't do it," Jim admits, slumping again despite his best efforts. "Didn't call Spock, either. Didn't call anyone. I —" he raises the mug and takes a sip, then sets it back, a good two feet behind them. "- I couldn't do that to anyone," he says, voice fading to almost nothing. "Couldn't make them be my last call, you know?"

"Jim," McCoy says, or tries to say, and isn't even sure either of them can hear him.

"I told you how Pike recruited me, right," Jim says, and there he goes again, prodding at an open wound just to make sure it still hurts, just to make sure he's still bleeding. Still alive. Still functioning. "Sat me down and told me about my father and dared me to do better."

McCoy doesn't even try to say anything this time.

"What if I didn't," Jim says, words tumbling over each other. "What if I never will, what if I should've died, what if me coming back means that, oh, I don't know, some security detail died in the hull breach? What if it doesn't matter? What if _I_ —" 

And McCoy can't take it anymore, just turns his head from the view and looks at Jim, looks at him properly, and Jim stops, _thank God_ , cuts himself off. McCoy can't see himself reflected in Jim's eyes or any such ridiculous bullshit, but he can see himself reflected on Jim's face, the cracked-open hurt of it, the sorrow and the fear and all of it, all the things he flung himself into space to get away from and found all over again. He's got nowhere to run.

"Jim," he says, and touches the first two fingers of his left hand, clumsy and uncoordinated, to Jim's throat, just under his jaw, to feel the steady pulse of his carotid artery. "Jim, no, Jim —" and he leaves his hand, curling his fingers around the side of Jim's face.

"There's nobody else I'd rather talk to," Jim admits, and it looks as though the words are tearing him apart, digging claws into his flesh with their utterance.

"You'll wake up," McCoy says, "I promise, Jim, dammit, you'll wake up tomorrow, and you'll wake up the next day, if I have to dump ice water on you myself, Jim, I swear. I'm a doctor, you know," he says, desperate for Jim to stop looking so gutted, so patchwork-sutured. "We don't make promises we can't keep."

"Like hell," Jim says, and he isn't smiling, but it isn't that awful cracked-mirror imitation of one, either. It's him, more honest than he's been in months. "What about _This won't hurt a bit_?"

"This won't hurt a bit," McCoy says, and shuffles over, awkward over the eaves, uses the leverage of one hand curled around Jim's face to tilt it towards his, and then — waits.

"We're not having the rest of this conversation like this," Jim says. McCoy can feel his breath, coffee-sour, lie-sweet. "I swear to God, Bones," he says, and closes the distance between them.

It's nothing spectacular, as kisses go; the sun doesn't suddenly come out from behind the clouds, they aren't suddenly dressed. McCoy is all too aware of the holes in the hem of his threadbare tee, the way his boxers are practically useless when it comes from preventing his tailbone from going steadily numb. Jim tastes of morning breath and coffee and, just a little, the sort of small-animal death that comes with a hangover.

Jim tastes alive.

"If you — if it hadn't worked," McCoy says, and they both know what he's talking about — blood samples, and serum, and endless computer projections and one-in-a-million chances (and that's all right, because Jim Kirk is a one-in-a-million chance that still comes up every time) — "I think I'd have had to scold you alive myself."

"No kisses for Sleeping Beauty?" Jim teases. This is how they do it. This is how they carry on, walking wounded; this is how they keep from bleeding out, from going under, with jokes of negligible import and laughter and infinitesimal moments. This is why McCoy keeps going back into space, why Jim Kirk puts up with the tabloids and the whispers, how Spock deals with the derogatory comments and Uhura keeps herself from murdering the less respectful cadets (though McCoy has, more than once, seen her make someone cry, which is more than justified in his official medical opinion). This is how they keep on keeping on, day after day, with the cumulative force of these small happinesses, these tiny instants of illumination.

"Do I get a white horse, then," McCoy says.

"I've got something better," Jim promises. "She'll fly you anywhere you like, and she's as beautiful as any white horse you've ever seen, at least."

"In that case, I think I can spare at least one more kiss," McCoy says, and for the first time in longer than he cares to remember, Jim Kirk smiles, just a little, but properly — open, and daring to hope, and daring to be happy.

The sun comes out from behind the clouds.


End file.
